Warning: spoilers ahead for You season 4 part 2.
“Goodbye, you.”
You season 5 is officially happening, which is great news for fans and probably less great news for Joe Goldberg as the buried bodies might finally come to light.
The show's fourth outing baited viewers into thinking Joe (Penn Badgley) might finally have seen the light on his toxic and murderous ways, only to reveal he was actually more dangerous than ever. After a preamble that set him up as the hunted rather than the hunter and on the snooping side of the search for the ‘Eat the Rich’ killer, its final episodes veered its new premise back on its former track, setting us up for a future where Joe really isn't as redeemed as we thought he was. But with his life seemingly back on track, season 5, which will be the last one, could throw a final spanner into the murder box.
Here's everything we know about You season 5.
Is there going to be a You season 5?
After a few weeks of letting the dust settle on what turned out to be one of the biggest plot twists in You's run (which is saying something considering Joe's track record), Netflix has finally announced the show will be back for a fifth and final season.
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While the fourth season technically ties things up for Joe in a neat bow, with his record wiped, his identity back, a small bookshop in his name and the bank account of the most powerful woman in the world at his fingertips, there are still some skeletons in the closet, or, shall we say, in the perspex box.
The confirmation is unsurprising considering how open the You team has been about wrapping up Joe's storyline once and for all. Speaking ahead of the announcement, Badgley said in an interview with GQ, “I know what Greg pitched me a few years back as what he thought was the right way to end. If there’s another one, it’s going to be, I think, a grand finale." Creator Sera Gamble has also hinted that, if they'd got the official go-ahead, Joe's next adventure will be even more dangerous. "We have spent four seasons constructing these characters who are violently wealthy, but not all of them are that smart or that ruthless," she explained. "If Joe is all of the things that he is and now has unlimited resources and access, he's become the thing that he envied and judged from afar. It gives us a lot of new opportunities."
What will You season 5 be about?
Season 4 seemingly reset everything for Joe as he's now back to being called his birth name thanks to his new beau Kate's (Charlotte Ritchie) endlessly powerful connections. With the help of the newly-inherited Lockwood estate, Joe managed to bring himself back from the dead after the staged murder-suicide of season 3's finale, scrubbing his image clean as the doting partner to the most powerful woman in the world and buying a bookshop to while away his days.
Still, all the dusty old books in the world can't keep the bodies buried forever, and with a few people left who know his true tendencies, including Marienne (Tati Gabrielle) and Nadia (Amy-Leigh Hickman), the loose ends aren't tied up tight enough. There's also the small factor of his ‘dark side’, brought literally to life in season 4 in the shape of Rhys Montrose (Ed Speleers), fading back into view in his reflection. Because make no mistake, despite his roguish charm and ability to skirt through every sticky situation, Joe is the villain of this story.
So with season 5 on the horizon, there are plenty of places to go. There is, of course, his relationship with Kate and the fact that Joe falling in love hasn't exactly turned out great for the women in the past. Speaking after the release of season 4, Ritchie revealed a bit about Kate's internal thought process. “I think she thinks that if he can be okay then she can be okay. So I think if she forgives him, it means that she has the potential for being forgiven. It's like she's saving herself, while she saves him. I think that's a big part of what it is between them, to be honest. They're both seeing their redemption in each other.” We'd say she should ask the other women who've tried to save Joe how that ended, but hardly any of them are still alive.
Amid the rampant success of Netflix’s horny serial killer drama, the former Gossip Girl star (and TikTok sensation) is still learning how to deal with ungodly levels of thirst
So, true to form, Joe could go down the route of killing his beloved. But say he really has changed, at least when it comes to his romantic entanglements, there's still a past that can't entirely be scrubbed clean. Nadia may be in prison now after being framed by Joe for killing her boyfriend Eddie, but she's still got time to blab. “I would love to come back and play her again”, Hickman has said. "I think that if she can pull off everything she did in season 4, there's not much she can't do," the actress continued. So I wouldn't put anything past her, I wouldn't [put anything] past Joe as well. I think that's something they have in common, weirdly."
It would be poetic justice for Joe's potential season 5 demise to come at the hands of the last two women he victimised and thought he'd got rid of. With Marienne presumed dead but secretly back in Paris thanks to Nadia, there's scope for some pretty gnarly justice to finally be served.
There's only really one way for things to go for Joe, as we learned with the bait and switch of season 4. Essentially, redemption isn't an option for the irreparable serial killer.
When would You season 5 come out?
The show's fourth season began filming in May 2022 before being released just shy of a year later. You has become one of Netflix's biggest runaway hits, so likely, we won't have to wait multiple years for its next outing (looking at you, Stranger Things). All things considered, we can probably expect Joe's last hurrah to land on our screens sometime in late 2024.
